


The Singer

by Otterly



Category: Zootopia (2016)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-14
Updated: 2017-09-14
Packaged: 2018-12-29 19:17:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,733
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12091653
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Otterly/pseuds/Otterly
Summary: A gazelle wants to sing. Wants other things, too. But other things get in the way and before you know it you've got your whole life ahead of you, and you can't do anything about it.





	The Singer

**Author's Note:**

> Nice and short.  
> For Thematic Thursday: 20s.

The queen sat in her throne, way at the back of the blind tiger, behind the smog of the cigars and the drunken henchmen making passes at the pretty fools who’d wandered in clinging to married arms. Golden blonde hair fell tragically over her right side, coming down in sharp waves that came down to her snout and covered her eye. She was frequently told that she looked sad. She wasn’t.

She sighed, causing the tigers around her to look up in alarm.

“Miss?”

“Are you alright?”

“Boss?”

The gazelle smiled. “I am fine, thank you. Today was…stressful. I suppose that I’m tired.”

“Understandable,” Jericho answered. He was the oldest of her friends, and the most vocal. The first to ask her if she was alright. Always. She loved him as much as she was allowed to. He always talked in a sweet, vulnerable rasp that would frequently take the air out of her speech. “Would you like to retire now, Ghazal?”

“No!” she said. “No. I want to hear the music.”

Jericho smiled at her, and the glint of his fangs made her smile back. “We’ve been here for hours, now. Are you sure?”

“Just one more song. One more song, _chico_. Then we will leave. Then I can sleep.”

 

* * *

 

That night, as many times before, she dreamed that she was a singer. A beautiful singer in a sparkling red dress, richer beyond belief and happier than anyone could imagine. Thousands of mammals flocked to her stage and they would cry when her voice struck something particularly beautiful. 

The dream didn’t last.

She woke just before dawn, dried tears matting the fur around her eyes. Ticking ticked steadily throughout her room in a calm manner, almost easing her off into sleep again before she willed herself out of her silken sheets. There was work to be done today and it wouldn’t be finished without her hooves. Perhaps later, when she was finished, a much needed break could be taken. She could listen to the music again, just before she went to sleep.

A knock sounded at her door, but there was something wrong.

Too forceful. No tact. Ghazal rushed to the door, dressing herself hurriedly in a straight dress and a fur-collared Preyda coat. Her standard outfit of choice. Something distinctly feminine to humiliate her rivals, and something beautiful to make herself feel like a woman of her station should. But none of that mattered right now. Jericho was not at her door.

She answered the knocking.

Kevan stood still, straight and stoic (as he usually did), but his typically robotic expression was instead one of a light panic. His breathing was hitched. Uneven. The stripes adorning his orange body seemed to go crooked at the sight of her.

“Hello,” he said, with a thick accented voice that was layered with slowly churned violence.

“Good morning, Kevan,” she greeted him, a worried look on her face. “Where is Jericho?”

“He’s been killed, miss.”

Ghazal blinked. She curled her lips inward, feeling the sticky wax of her lipstick against them as she spread it around and pouted them out again. “Killed.”

“Someone has killed him.”

“I know that, Kevan. How?”

“Freezing.”

“He’s been iced?” she asked, beginning to walk down the splendored halls of her mansion. Her feet clacked heavily against the polished wood floors. They reminded her of the ticking on her clock. That, and the sound of drums.

Kevan stalked silently beside her. “That is what we think.”

“Why?” she asked herself more than him. “I thought we had made it clear with the shrews that Savannah Central and Sahara Square are mine to sell in. We have not ventured outside of that territory.”

“We do not know. Yet. There’s the possibility that—“

“Those _fucking_  sheep,” she said, realization gripping her legs, making her stand still. “They wanted to piss me off.”

“Did they?”

“They did. Get your brother. Then get the rest of our family. We still have that spy?”

“We do.”

“Tell him to come home. You’re going to The Gold Meadow tonight. Light the place up.”

“And you, miss?”

“Where’s the body?”

* * *

 

Ghazal felt homesick. Strange, because she had never seen the burning ivory sands of her family’s homeland. She was Zootopian from the hair on her head to the blood that ran through her perfect, god given body. The fact that her mother would tell her stories from the old country when she was sick and by the fireplace remained, however. Ghazal could still feel the fingers stroking her hair, whispering softly as it told brave tales about warriors that took what they wanted, and never settled for less.

She felt those fingers at her mother’s funeral, and she felt them now, looking down at her friend’s body, shoved into a coffin at this two-bit church that she bought earlier on in her career.

Jericho looked dead. Because he was. Ghazal wasn’t sure what to think about him other than that. This was indeed, at one point, the tiger that rose her up from starvation and brought her a kingdom, but it was him no longer. Looking at him unsettled her.

Blood painted his beautiful, unkempt fur. His lower half was kept covered, though. She assumed that there was nothing worth seeing there save for the wounds he sustained, and she did not want to see those.

A twinge of heartbreak wormed its way into her heart, stabbing at her every time it dared to beat for this dead friend of hers.

Ghazal cried. She stood still as she did so.

“You know what they’re going to call this decade in the future?” a low, quaking voice asked her.

The queen dried her eyes and turned to meet a cougar, suit white with the cotton of his employers. She raised an eyebrow. “What?”

“Roaring. The Roaring Twenties, for the death cries of the lions and the tiger and the bears that died for the wrong reasons,” he said, waving a paw in the air as if it would make the words appear in front of him. “Modernity and madness. Heartbreak and intrigue. Jazz singing our morality to sleep as we cuddle up in the corner with our illegal alcohol and our bloody money. Gangsters. Bosses. Gangs.”

He fixed his eyes on her. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

“Me too,” she replied. “Why did your bosses do this?”

“It beats me. They’re not like you, miss. They don’t let preds to their planning table. If you asked me, though, which I suppose you’re doing, I think that they want to expand their territory. More woolly speakeasies. That, or they’re mad at you for something. I don’t think that’s the case, though,” he rattled off. “I hear talk. All the boys say you’re an angel. Even the boys who you’ve taken from.”

“That’s very nice of them,” Ghazal hummed, a smile on her face. “Why did you come here, _señor_?”

The cougar shook his head. “They wanted me to tell you to stay down.”

“I see.”

“Will you?”

“No. No. Of course not.”

 

* * *

 

She sat at the bar, listening to the gentle tones of the radio as her tigers moved the kegs out from the back and loaded them into cars for reselling. Gold light lit the lavish lounge around her, putting a nice glimmer on the silver cups and the bullets strewed across the floor.

Coppery blood wafted into her nose. It was a smell that she didn’t usually mind, but today it wasn’t doing her headache any favors. After a moment, she called Kevan over. A glass of something strong would clear her sinuses and calm her shaking hooves.

“What will it be, miss?”

“What did they have, Kevan?” she asked, nearly half asleep from the exhaustion. “Bourbon?”

“Whiskey.”

“They all taste the same to me if I’m honest,” she admitted. “Which I am not. But that just now, was honest. Would — pour me a glass, please.”

The pour had her transfixed. The sound of the whiskey hitting the bottom of the glass and slowly filling its contents gave Ghazal a sort of small happiness for a moment, and then it was filled, and that was over. She took the glass into her hooves and gave it a long swig before slamming it down onto the polished mahogany. “I’m sorry, Kevan.”

“Why?” he questioned, as if her apologizing to him was the strangest thing in the world which, to his credit, probably was. “You give me a job. You make use of my talents.”

“You don’t deserve this,” the gazelle posited. “You come to Zootopia, you think you’re going to get work and everyone’s going to accept you for your merit but all you get is this. And me. Us. The prey who take advantage of you and use you to get rich and sell drugs and do crimes. What did you even come here for?”

“I come with nothing and then I have you. No regret, miss,” Kevan assured her. He took her glass, which she didn’t realize she had finished, and polished it off before stepping around the bar to offer her his paw. “Come, let’s go to blind tiger.”

“I still don’t like that word,” she hummed. “But yes. Let’s go.”

Kevan murmured to her softly as he led her to the car, stepping over the bodies and the bullets on the ground.

* * *

 

The queen reigned behind the smog and the spilled booze, in a velvet booth that rubbed softly against her shoulders and her legs when she moved the slightest inch. Her hair was brushed backwards for today. She liked it better that way. Made her easier on the eyes, she thought.

“Can I ask you something?” Kevan had asked a moment ago.

“What?” she replied a second too late.

“What did _you_ come here for?”

 

"My mother and father came so their children could live their dream," Ghazal blinked. Her eyes went misty and distant, lost at sea for just a second before they regained the stable clarity that they always had. “But I stayed because I wanted to be a singer. My mother did, too.”

“What happened?” he breathed. "I'm sure you sing beautifully."

“Things that don't need explaining. Things that are typical of mammals who end up in places like this. But…maybe one day.”

“One day,” he repeated. “When would you like to leave?”

“One more song, _chico_.”


End file.
